Nathan Newman

A PLAN for the States

There are a few dirty secrets about politics that progressives
need to come to grips with.

The first maybe not-so-secret fact is that we have little power
to enact progressive policy in Washington, D.C. The Congress, White
House and Supreme Court are completely dominated by conservatives.
And even if the Republicans lost enough seats to move nominal control
to the Democrats, the reality is that a combination of conservative
Democrats, filibusters in the Senate and presidential vetoes will
block any serious progressive change.

The second dirty secret is that the rightwing has increasingly
turned its attention to the statehouses across the country -- and
most progressive activists haven't been paying attention. Groups like
the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), backed
by its many corporate patrons, have been taking over state
legislatures after state legislature across the country. More than
2400 state lawmakers -- roughly one-third of all state legislators
&endash; and 34 state house speakers, 25 state senate presidents, 31
state senate leaders and 33 state house Leaders are ALEC members.

ALEC-backed legislation has crippled social service budgets,
deregulated industries, slashed medical care for the poor and
undermined consumer and worker protections in state after state.

Why It Matters: Which is the third dirty secret of American
politics: state policy matters.

State and local revenues account for 16.2% of the Gross Domestic
Product, almost exactly equal to federal revenues as a percentage of
GDP. Increasing "flexibility" and "waivers" offered to states in how
they administer programs like TANF and Medicaid increases the stakes
in who controls state legislatures. State courts reported 17 million
civil cases in 2003, including contract, tort and real property
disputes. Through state law and liability rules, the states regulate
trillions of dollars of commerce in the economy. Through public
employee pension funds, state governments control $2.7 trillion of
capital. And with 1.9 million prisoners in state and local prisons
and jails, it's worth remembering that the criminal sentencing
decisions that have decimated a generation of young people,
especially in minority communities, were made in statehouses, not on
Capitol Hill.

Rightwing groups are able to dominate policy in the statehouses
because state legislatures are often made up of poorly paid,
part-time lawmakers with few if any staff to challenge the expertise
presented by conservative operatives -- or to uncover the hidden
payoffs for corporate interests contained in legislation they
introduce.

The Rightwing Agenda: A lot of the rightwing agenda are simple
payoffs to the corporate patrons of the rightwing: oil companies get
gas tax cuts, pharmaceutical companies block proposals to import
cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, cities are blocked from
creating municipal Internet services, and so on.

But the real threat of rightwing groups like ALEC is that they
are pursuing a coordinated strategy to undermine the very capacities
of government to restrain corporate power. They are enacting
constitutional provisions to permanently disable the taxing power of
state governments, using the rhetoric of "tort reform" to shut the
court room door to anyone holding corporate criminals accountable,
and are privatizing government services and public pensions in order
to undermine public employee unions and create a "pay to play" system
of corporate contractors to feed their election machines.

They are using control of state government to cut off the sources
of funding for progressive politics. Shutting down the tort system
cuts off funds to trial lawyers, so-called "paycheck protection" laws
undermine union political action, defunding academic research centers
blocks alternative intellectual challenges to industry claims, and
privatization shifts money from public employee activists to
conservative corporate contractors. By operating at the state level,
outside the glare of media attention and full political focus by
progressives, it's a bit like the rightwing is tunneling underground;
by the time the ground gives away, it'll be too late to save the
progressive house.

Progressives Can Win: But there is one more political secret.

Progressives do win occasionally in the states and have the
potential to win far more often than they do now. In states covering
nearly half the population, the minimum wage has been raised above
the national rate -- significantly more in many cities and states.
Even as the federal government does nothing on global warming, a
number of state legislatures have passed rules to restrict carbon
dioxide emissions in those states. State and local governments are
confronting corporate influence on elections with stronger campaign
finance regulations: "red state" Arizona has become a pioneer with
one of the most expansive systems of public financing of elections in
the country.

Those efforts are often drowned in a sea of other rightwing
legislation and local activists, unions and legislators toil in these
fights with little or no national attention and little of the
coordination of their efforts that the rightwing has orchestrated for
decades. But the victories progressives do achieve show that more
investment in state efforts will yield large dividends for national
policy changes.

Enter the Progressive Legislative Action Network or PLAN which
aims to provide national coordination of state legislative campaigns.
This new organization is backed by major labor unions, including
SEIU, AFSCME and the AFL-CIO, national policy shops, grassroots
groups like MoveOn.org, and a wide range of legislators in the
states. Its kickoff conference in Seattle last fall was attended by
300 people, including legislators from thirty-eight states.

PLAN's goal is to use every tool of grassroots mobilization to
build unity among progressive state legislators and deploy both
strong policies and innovative strategies to beat the conservatives
at their own game. The overarching strategy has to be finding the
best public policy and championing it with effective and cohesive
messaging.

The whole idea was so compelling that I signed up last month as
PLAN's Policy Director, part of an impressive team that will be
implementing this strategy in the coming year. This month, PLAN is
launching its website and twice-weekly email newsletter to keep
legislators and activists up-to-date on what's happening in the
states. And we are releasing a report detailing the rightwing agenda
in the states and how progressives can respond. You can check it all
out at www.progressivestates.org/

This column will no doubt be influenced by my work with PLAN but
anything I write here in the future should not be construed as
reflecting the communal wisdom of my new employer.

Nathan Newman is a long-time union and community activist.
Email nathan@newman.org or see www.nathannewman.org.